Jumping right in with your organic intersections, you're doing a good job of laying out the sausages themselves such that they actually wrap around one another with a believable sense of gravity pressing down on the whole set. When it comes to your cast shadows however, I do feel that there is room for improvement here, as marked out directly on your work here. Your shadows don't quite follow the surfaces upon which they're cast correctly, and tend to be minimized, resulting in some inconsistencies. Always keep a consistent light source in mind, and factor in how the surface upon which the shadow falls actually sits in space - whether it's another sausage that curves away from the object casting the shadow, or the ground plane itself.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I think there's a fair bit that's being handled well here, but there are also a number of smaller concerns that I have addressed in critiques of your previous works (some of them being specifically celebrating the fact that you weren't making certain common mistakes), but that do come up here. For example:

• Engaging with your drawing in 2D space by modifying the silhouettes of forms that have already been drawn, rather than adding your changes only through the addition of complete, self-enclosed forms with purposefully designed silhouettes that establish the relationships between the forms).

• Not making consistent and complete use of the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs.

• Slipping back towards more general focus on 'decoration' rather than the specific elements that 'texture' as discussed in Lesson 2 focuses upon - though this was only limited to this cow where you fell back into using form shading (which as explained here does not play a role in the drawings we produce in this course). Since it only came up once, I won't address it further in this critique.

To the first point, as shown here on your dog construction, I've highlighted in blue a number of spots where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3D structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched area exists only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D.

For the second point, I'll just paste in what I included in my critique of your Lesson 4 work:

The only real issue of concern is that I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).

Continuing on from there, there is some further advice I can offer on a couple of topics: the design of your additional masses' silhouettes, and how we approach constructing our animals' heads. One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.

Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

I've drawn some additional masses on the same dog as before to demonstrate exactly how we could build up the kind of structure you attempted to previously through the use of a more blobby mass, contour lines, and some flat shapes. Note in particular:

• How we additional masses wrap around the existing structure (as noted with the blue lines,.which each pair with a specific inward curve).

• Each of these inward curves establish specific relationships between each mass and the existing structures - whether those existing structures are the torso sausage, the mass at the shoulder or hip (where quadrupeds usually have more muscle mass to help them run and walk), or even other additional masses which, once added to the construction, become a part of that "existing structure".

Another thing to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasize the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one. As such, it's always important to ask yourself for every mark you want to put down, "what is the purpose of this mark", "how can I draw this mark so it accomplishes its goal as effectively as possible", and lastly - "are there any other marks that are already accomplishing this goal".

Those contour lines aside, there are two main tools we have at our disposal when building up our constructions with new forms, and making those forms feel solid and 3D:

• Purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes (as discussed above). This is the tool to use if you're adding something that wraps around the existing structure.

• A contour line more similar to those used in Lesson 2's form intersections - which defines the joint or seam between two intersecting/interpenetrating forms. This is the tool to use if you actually have forms that are being "welded" together, like how the individual sausage segments in the sausage method have their joints defined with a contour line.

The last point to discuss is more of a recommendation for how to approach head construction in next set of animals. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. I do see some elements of this approach - for example, you block out your muzzles with good, boxy forms, although the way in which they actually connect to the cranial ball could be defined a little more clearly with lines that curve along the ball's surface. There are however many cases where you end up going with entirely different strategies. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

As there are a number of areas I'd like you to demonstrate your understanding, I am going to have to assign some revisions. You'll find them listed below.